Hillman's passion for music resurfaces with Desert Rose Band

Chris Hillman doesn’t play the “what if” game. He stopped doing it years ago.

Without looking back and second-guessing anything over a 50-year career, though, Hillman is comfortable in his own skin and with his place in rock ’n’ roll history.

One of the original members of the Byrds — along with Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark and Michael Clarke, who were all elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991 — Hillman left that group, and with collaborator Gram Parsons, was an integral force in the development of what’s now known as “country rock” as a co-founder of the Flying Burrito Brothers in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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Hillman eschews the “country rock” designation — “Those are labels that are laid on later,” he said — but he does believe one can’t continue to make music over the course of five decades without having a passion for making that music.

“It was a passion and I got to do something that I really loved and I survived it,” said Hillman in a recent interview from his home in Ventura, Calif. “I didn’t make those heinous mistakes that some of my cohorts made.”

After leaving the Burritos in the mid-1970s, Hillman hooked up with Stephen Stills in the band Manassas, and in the 1980s, formed the Desert Rose Band, one of country music’s most successful bands through the 1980s and 1990s.

It’s that incarnation of Hillman’s career — the Desert Rose Band — that fans will get a chance to see in what’s being billed as a rare acoustic performance by Hillman and three original members of the band — Herb Pedersen, John Jorgenson and Bill Bryson — for one show at 8 p.m. Friday, April 26, at the Sellersville Theater 1894.

Hillman and Pedersen appeared last year in Sellersville as a duet, but adding Jorgenson and Bryson this time enhances and enlarges the acoustic presentation, according to Hillman.

“I love working. The only band that I put back together once in a while is the Desert Rose Band,” said Hillman. “It was the only band I was in that we all parted as friends.”

He prefers what he calls the “more gentle approach” that is associated with an acoustic show.

“I don’t like loud and abrasive in that sense. I don’t want anyone to think I don’t like electric music, but acoustically is a softer approach. And as a lead singer, I’m not dealing with a loud band, which would affect my voice,” said Hillman.

Allowing that both the music business and listeners’ tastes have certainly changed over the course of his career, Hillman prefers doing the type of shows he’s doing now.

“You’re talking about an era like the 1960s, into the 1970s and somewhat into the 1980s — there wasn’t such an emphasis on instant gratification,” he said. “We were doing live shows all over the place and record companies — for the most part — were run by music guys who loved music. It wasn’t quite as corporate at the time.

“In the 1970s, if you were signed by Warner Brothers or Asylum Records, they would keep you around for three or four albums,” said Hillman. “There wasn’t exactly an assumption that you would go double-platinum right away. Most of the time it was an artistic thing. They would train you. That’s what really happened. You developed — you had a bit of creative free reign.”

His time with the Byrds is well documented, and his association with Gram Parsons — which ended when Parsons was let go from the Flying Burrito Brothers in 1972 — ended tragically with Parsons’ death of a drug overdose on Sept. 9, 1973, in California.

Parsons’ and Hillman’s work with the Byrds and the Burritos has been described as “enormously influential” in both rock and country because of their ability to blend the two genres of music.

“Gram was a great guy when he was focused and working,” said Hillman. “But we lost our focus and I lost him. Gram had talent. But it’s one thing to have talent and it’s another thing to have work ethic to make that happen. And he wasted it, wasted it, wasted it. We were brothers, but we became Cain and Abel. Seriously, that’s the way to describe it.”

In the end, it comes back to the passion for the music, Hillman said.

“If I were going to go through the genius of hindsight, I was a shy guy, all the way up to the mid-1970s,” he said. “I finally took over and learned how to sing properly. I could sing in tune, I just didn’t have any feeling, I didn’t quite use my voice properly.”

It’s been 50 years, since 1963, that Hillman was first paid to play music. And he’s still having a good time.

“It was all about the passion for the music. I never thought I’d get paid — none of us did,” he said. “But it’s always been a joy.

“Playing acoustically is far more of a challenge without that huge cacophony of sound that one tends to get lost in. And it is very special in a sense of how you present that. It’s always a challenge to play into a microphone,” said Hillman.